And over the weekend, the saga regarding Canonical, GNOME, and KDE has continued. Lots of comments all over the web, some heated, some well-argued, some wholly indifferent. Most interestingly, Jeff Waugh and Dave Neary have elaborated on GNOME's position after the initial blog posts by Shuttleworth and Seigo, providing a more coherent look at GNOME's side of the story.

Well, I mostly agree with your assessment Thom, except the "more coherent picture" part - this is anything but coherent. What's more, not a single specific point raised by Mark or Aaron has been addressed properly. Instead, it's a who said what back in 2008. They can't get any more evasive than this, boggling down the whole technical aspect of collaboration in minute and irrelevant details. Yeah, GNOME is difficult to understand => nobody understands us properly (and Mark and all critics misunderstand GNOME completely) - what bullshit!

Seigo's critique still stands - rejecting the spec on the basis that no GNOME app uses it is pure tautology: no GNOME app uses it because it is not accepted by GNOME as a spec. I'm not kidding, that was one of the reasons for rejection! These obviously political reasons (read either Mark's or Seigo's blog for the other 3) are the issue at hand, and of course it's kinda difficult to tackle those, so here we are, in who said what land, and of course, oh my, people just don't get it how GNOME works of coure...

Seigo's critique still stands - rejecting the spec on the basis that no GNOME app uses it is pure tautology: no GNOME app uses it because it is not accepted by GNOME as a spec. I'm not kidding, that was one of the reasons for rejection! These obviously political reasons (read either Mark's or Seigo's blog for the other 3) are the issue at hand, and of course it's kinda difficult to tackle those, so here we are, in who said what land, and of course, oh my, people just don't get it how GNOME works of coure...

AFAIK, mark is shifting blame on gnome there, while project maintainers were the ones refusing patches, not gnome core. but then again, no one specifies which projects were the ones refusing patches, so i could be wrong with my putting blame on mark. in that case, better question is which projects and why. surely there is bugzilla entry where they refused

Hmm, that's interesting, for a specification or any low level common framework only makes sense if it can be expected to be present on every system. Again, D-BUS comes to mind - D-BUS (and fontconfig, libixml, etc.) would not make any sense if desktops could not expect it on any system they are being installed on. If statusnotifier is to become a spec, then it must be just like that.

Mark seems to mix up external and optional dependencies. Actually, some cross-desktop frameworks are BOTH! HAL comes to mind - if present, DE's can (or could, it's being deprecated) take advantage of it, if not (for example, FreeBSD got HAL much later than Linux), they would fall back on their old mechanisms. Regardless, this is not a really crucial issue, it's more like a distraction (look, Mark is wrong, muhahaha). Not to mention the fact that the very first line on the page the poster links to reads like this (bold is mine):

External Dependencies of GNOME 2.91.x

This page lists the versions of external dependencies that GNOME modules may depend upon, as well as a recommended version of each dependency.

So are external dependencies the absolute minimum requirements that MUST be there on every system, or are they optional?